Modern machines often are equipped with complex systems to support a wide range of operations. The operational conditions of these complex systems, such as an engine system, may need to be monitored in order to diagnose and/or predict certain failures of the systems. A wide variety of techniques and apparatus have been developed for diagnosing engines and engine control systems, including expert systems, fuzzy logic based systems, and neural network models. These techniques and apparatus may be used for diagnostic and/or prognostic purposes. A diagnostic system may be used to identify a root source of a failure after the failure has occurred, and a prognostic system may be used to identify a root source of a failure before the failure has occurred.
Some of these conventional techniques operate only to classify operation conditions into two categories, normal or abnormal, without offering further analysis to identify possible causes for failures. Other conventional techniques, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,240,343 B1 issued to Sarangapani et al. on May 29, 2001, use differences between actual values from an engine and model values from a process model as ordinary inputs to the process model to generate output patterns of failures based on prior knowledge of the system. However, such techniques may require a large amount of computational time and often fail to identify relationships between the failures and particular inputs and their control logics.
Further, conventional techniques often fail to maintain or repair the complex systems using the diagnostic and analysis information. For example, conventional techniques may often fail to determine time and type of a scheduled maintenance based on a predicted root source of a failure before the failure has occurred. These conventional techniques may also often fail to configure the operational conditions of the complex systems for continuous operation after a failure has occurred or a potential failure has been predicted but before a scheduled maintenance can be performed.
Methods and systems consistent with certain features of the disclosed systems are directed to solving one or more of the problems set forth above.